‚Äô and √© instead of ’ and é: fix Mac mojibake

Why a square root sign shows up

In UTF-8, accented letters take two bytes and curly quotes three – é is C3 and A9. Mac Roman, Apple’s old character set, turns each byte into a character of its own: C3 becomes the square root sign √, A9 becomes ©. The apostrophe ’ (E2 80 99) turns into ’. It’s the Mac counterpart of `é` on Windows.

We’re “thrilled” – the café’s résumé workshop starts at 9.

We’re “thrilled” – the café’s résumé workshop starts at 9.

The most common patterns

• ’ → ’, ‘ → ‘
• “ → “, ” → ”
• – → –, — → —, … → …, € → €
• é → é, è → è, ñ → ñ, ü → ü

The full table is further down. ’ is the Mac version of ’ – more on broken apostrophes and quotes.

Where Mac Roman still turns up

• Excel for Mac: older versions saved CSV files in Mac Roman – [how to open CSV files in Excel correctly](C:/Program Files/Git/en/excel-special-characters/).
• Exports from databases and apps that offer “Macintosh” as character set, such as FileMaker.
• Old files from before Mac OS X, opened today in a UTF-8 program.
• Copied text that a CMS or newsletter tool took over with the wrong character set.

The same in the Windows console: é instead of é

A similar pattern appears in Command Prompt and PowerShell: the console uses the old DOS code page 437 (850 in Western Europe). There é becomes é and ’ becomes ΓÇÖ. Mojibuster recognizes that too. How to switch the console to UTF-8 is explained on the PowerShell page.

Export done: “Résumé – final.csv” saved.

Export done: “Résumé – final.csv” saved.

Whole files in Mac Roman or DOS

If a file was saved entirely in Mac Roman or CP850, drop it into the box above: Mojibuster detects the character set and converts it to UTF-8. If the detection isn’t clear-cut, the tool offers to read the file in another character set.

Common broken characters

Frequently asked questions

More guides

• Mojibake fixer for all kinds of text Repair garbled characters in text and files.
• Fix CSV encoding Repair special characters in CSV exports and save as UTF-8.
• Excel characters When Excel shows é instead of é after opening a CSV.
• Fix UTF-8 Remove mojibake from databases, emails and websites.
• Fix subtitles Repair SRT and VTT subtitles with broken characters.
• What is mojibake? Meaning, origin and causes of garbled text.
• Double-encoded When é first became é and then é.
• é instead of é Table of é, ñ, ü and more – and what’s behind them.
• Apostrophes & quotes ’, “, – and … instead of apostrophes, quotes and dashes.
• Question marks instead of characters ? or � instead of letters – what can be rescued and what can’t.
• WordPress & database Repair SQL dumps and WordPress content showing é instead of é.
• MySQL & phpMyAdmin Set the charset of table, connection and import correctly.
• Outlook Fix broken characters in e-mails and contact exports.
• PowerShell -Encoding, console and script files in PowerShell 5.1 and 7.
• Python & pandas encoding in read_csv, to_csv, open() and requests.
• Notepad++ Choose or convert the encoding – the crucial difference.
• Customer data & CRM Repair customer lists from CRM and ERP without uploading them.
• Big5, GBK, Shift_JIS → UTF-8 Convert old Chinese, Japanese and Korean files to UTF-8.
• Hindi, Tamil, Bengali text Hindi, Tamil or Bengali text shows à¤, à® or à¦? Repair it here.
• Kruti Dev to Unicode Hindi typed in Kruti Dev shows up as fgUnh? Convert it to Unicode.
• Preeti to Unicode Nepali typed in Preeti shows up as g]kfn? Convert it to Unicode.
• Bijoy to Unicode Bengali typed in Bijoy shows up as evsjv? Convert it to Unicode.
• For businesses & data protection officers How Mojibuster protects data – and how to verify it yourself.